Desalination plans for Algarve scaled up

A long standing plan to build a desalination plant in the drought-stricken Algarve has been scaled up, but still is criticised for being insufficient to cope with the area’s needs. Minister for the Environment Duarte Cordeiro said the decision to increase its capacity was taken by Águas de Portugal and Águas do Algarve. “The desalination plant we had planned could handle eight cubic hectometres and potentially use up to 16. Now, the decision was made to increase its size to reach 24 cubic hectometres.”

As the majority of mainland Portugal is experiencing drought conditions, the country’s meteorology agency IPMA said the most affected regions were inland areas in northern and central Portugal, the Alentejo region, and the eastern part of the Algarve in the south. IPMA said this April was the third-driest and fourth-warmest in the last 92 years in mainland Portugal. Due to drought more and more desalination plants are being built in Europe, even in Northern European countries like Belgium and the Netherlands.

Location

The plant, earmarked for two possible locations – Albufeira and Lagos – was originally to have been fully financed by the country’s Recovery and Resilience Program (PRR). However, the minister told Lusa news agency that the budget would increase from ‘40 million [euros] to around 50 million’ and that, should the difference not be guaranteed through the PRR, other forms of financing would be assured. “That is, if we do not have financing conditions through the PRR, we will find other sources of financing. This did not inhibit decision-making. The decision has been made. The desalination plant will be larger than expected,” the minister said.

Too little too late

The plans have been blasted by a local expert, a professor at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Algarve (UALG), who said building not one, but two or three desalination plants in the region is essential. Nuno Loureiro who has been following the drought situation in the region for years told Portuguese radio station TSF on 22 May that, “by his calculations, by the end of September, the integrated dam system in the region will be at the very least, around 16% [of capacity]. A frightening value.” Considering the drought could be worse in the future the academic added “when we die of thirst, we will realize that we needed desalination plants.”

Moratorium agriculture

Loureiro also noted that the desalination plant planned for the region, whose environmental impact study has still not been delivered, will only have a capacity of 24 million cubic metres, when existing dams in the Algarve have a capacity of 400 million cubic metres. He added that there must be a moratorium on allowing further irrigated agriculture in the region and suggested that time-honoured methods of storing water should be reintroduced. “How did our grandparents live in the Algarve? They all had cisterns, they used the water from the winter rains to have a volume of water available for spring and today we really need it.”